Make It Work vs. Make It Good
There are two wolves inside of me, lol.
Some days I want to be a “designer”. Other days I want to be a “developer”.
On the days I find myself wanting to feed the developer, it’s often because making something “work” seems easier (and more impressive) than making something “good”.
Making something function often results in a reaction of “Wow, that’s so cool! It didn’t work before and now it does! And I could’ve never made that, nice job!”
And sometimes it’s like, good job, you made a bear ride a unicycle. Not really what bears are supposed to do — and they’ll probably never be good at it — but it’s novel and functioning!
However, the task of making something good — of arriving at a solution that is obvious — is often met with a kind of ambivalence, like “Nice work…I guess? Seems obvious tbh.”
That’s the work of design: to make something so good, it’s obvious. But there’s often little acclaim for the obvious because, well, it’s so obvious (in hindsight).
This plays out in many different ways.
For example, consider a task like making a web site responsive.
In my experience, it’s often quite easy to get people to say “Hey that’s cool, it looks like a mobile site now! Good job!” Getting to that point is often just a matter of sticking a few media queries in your CSS. And people are impressed because they’re not honing in on the details of how it works, just that it works at all.
“Cool, the site displays on a mobile phone now! We can move on.”
But just because it works doesn’t mean it’s good.
And that extra mile to “it works on mobile and it’s also a good experience” is a ton of work. Is it fast? Is it accessible? Is it intuitive? Does it work across multiple devices? Can it be iterated on quickly? So. Many. Questions.
“Does it work?” is a binary question.
“Is it good?” is a subjective question whose answer lives at the intersection of multi-disciplinary knowledge and taste, which is to say: it’s harder to answer than “Does it work?”
“Let’s do X” often boils down to two stages:
- Make it work
- Make it good
To “make it work”, all you gotta do is get it running. Consensus on when to applaud and reward the work is simple because it’s either working or it’s not.
To “make it good” requires all kinds of nuanced work. Consensus on when to applaud and reward this work is often impossible to discern because not everyone agrees on what “good” looks like.
“Make it work” is the first 90% of the work. “Make it good” is the other 90%.